Twitter filter: Why does Twitter widget "die"?

October 26, 2010 9:15 AM

Dumb question here, especially coming from a web developer ... But I use a Twitter widget on occasion on the front page of the site I work on. We'll be using it again Election night from about 4pm through to the wee morning hours. The widget is the standard-variety Twitter-supplied widget (http://twitter.com/widgets). The problem is, this widget always seems to "die" at some point during its use. That is, it will display tweets just fine for an hour or two (maybe even three, if I'm lucky), then it stops displaying tweets altogether, showing just the styled box, completely devoid of tweets. Search as I have, google-fu has failed me. Can't seem to come up with an explanation that seems reasonable to my supervisors. Any ideas?
posted by jrchaplin to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If I recall the widgets available on twitter.com use their public API which has limits as to how much traffic can go out over them. You might be exceeding the API limits and they're cutting you off?
posted by msbutah at 9:19 AM on October 26, 2010

Ditto. Try limiting it to 100 tweets a minute at
posted by tel3path at 9:25 AM on October 26, 2010

Best answer: Here's a link to pull your remaining usage.
And here is their dev documentation.
posted by msbutah at 9:38 AM on October 26, 2010

Best answer: Thirding the idea the API is kicking you out after x people load the page, causing at least x requests to the API. Is there a way you can pull the tweets yourself and cache the results? Otherwise, under the preferences for a profile widget there's a setting for poll for new results (which you should probably set to "No") and one to control the delay before it polls again (make it really high or shut it off if possible).
posted by yerfatma at 9:39 AM on October 26, 2010

Does it happen in one particular browser or all browsers? You could be leaking XHR objects or something like that. But yeah, most likely API rate limiting as others have said.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:38 AM on October 26, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks all.

API limit is/was the culprit. Don't know why I didn't think of that.

I may have to do what msbutah suggests and find a way to cache results on our server.
posted by jrchaplin at 4:39 AM on October 27, 2010